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Published: 22 December 2022

 

Dear colleagues,

A Happy New Year 2023 to everybody! Thank you very much for your interest in the EUPHA-HWR section and for your support. Many thanks also to the EUPHA colleagues in the Office the continuing support!

 

Looking back

The annual activities report of the EUPHA-HWR section and a report from the Join-the-Network session at the EPH Conference in Berlin are available on our website; https://eupha.org/section_page.php?section_page=164

Highlights of 2022 include the organisation of a health workforce webinar series in collaboration with partner organisations in spring 2022 and contributions to a very successful EPH Conference in November 2022 in Berlin, attended by more than 2,500 delegates from 79 countries worldwide. EUPHA-HWR organised or contributed to several events, including:

  • Building capacity for a resilient and healthy post-COVID health workforce, workshop organised by EUPHA-HWR and WHO Regional Office for Europe
  • Mobilising coping and support strategies: learning from healthcare workers’ experiences of COVID-19, round table organised by Robert-Koch-Institute Germany (National Public Health Institute) (Heide Weishaar) and EUPHA-HWR
  • Public Health institutions and academia’s role in building capacity for health impact assessment, workshop organised by EUPHA-HIA (Piedad Martin Olmedo), EUPHA-HWR and ASPHER
  • A digital literate health workforce for a resilient future, round table organised by EUPHAnxt and Young Forum Gastein
  • The WHO Report ‘Health and care workforce in Europe: time to act’, lunchtime session organised by WHO Europe
  • Join-the-Network session

 

Looking ahead

EUPHA-HWR is currently planning several midterm activities in spring/summer 2023 in collaboration with partner organisations, including e.g. webinars on ‘health workforce circular migration’ and ‘violence against healthcare workers’ including sexual violence and harassment against women healthcare workers. With WHO Europe and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, we are preparing a session at the WHO Europe Regional Meeting on Health and Care Workforce in Bucharest and e also applied for a session at the Global Forum on Human Resources for Health. More details will be available soon.

 

Conferences in 2023 – save the dates!

The Fifth Global Forum on Human Resources for Health (HRH) takes place in Geneva, Switzerland, 3-5 April 2023. The format will be hybrid to enable virtual and in-person sessions, and will be hosted from the WHO headquarters in Geneva. The Forum will be held under the theme of Protecting, safeguarding, and investing in the health and care workforce. It will examine the required policy solutions, investments and multi-sectoral partnerships to address health and care workforce challenges and advance health systems towards universal health coverage and health security. The outcomes of the Forum will inform the United Nations General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on UHC in September 2023; https://www.who.int/news/item/12-04-2022-save-the-date--fifth-global-forum-on-human-resources-for-health. According to current information, access to virtual participation will be free of charge. More information will shortly be available at: https://www.who.int/teams/health-workforce.

 

The EHMA (European Health Management Association) Annual Conference on ‘Health management: sustainable solutions for complex systems’ will take place on 5-7 June 2023 in Rome, Italy, co-hosted by ALTEMS, Catholic University of Sacred Heart. It provides a platform to showcase the latest evidence in health management, share best practices, connect with peers and decision-makers, and inform policy at the regional, national and European level. The ‚workforce of the future‘ is one of the topics that submitters can select. Deadline for abstract submission: 6 February 2023, 11 am CET; https://ehmaconference.org/call-for-abstracts-2022/

 

The next EPH Conference takes place in Dublin, Ireland, 8-11 November 2023 under the theme ‘Our food, our health, our earth: a sustainable future for humanity’; https://ephconference.eu/Dublin-2023-333. Abstract submission will open on 1 February until 1 May 2023; https://ephconference.eu/meet-the-chair-of-dublin-2023-364

 

Notices

#Health Too is a new project launched by Women in Global health in September 2022. The organisers highlight that, ‘Nearly two thirds of 330,000 health workers surveyed across a range of countries reported exposure to work-related violence and harassment (WRVH) in a single year, according to the Journal for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. However a lack of disaggregated of the data means that we don’t know how much of this relates to Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harassment (SEAH). …. The #HealthToo project aims to address the absence of data and provide information and analysis on the scale and type of SEAH as a way to make workplace abuse visible and drive the necessary policy reform to end it. It will be a safe space for all women in the health sector to share their experiences in any language and be part of the global movement against SEAH in global health‘; https://womeningh.org/healthtoo-project/. Please visit the website for further information; a first summary report is available; https://womeningh.org/healthtoo/

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Addressing the health workforce crisis in Africa and in Europe. Africa-Europe Foundation, November 2022; https://www.africaeuropefoundation.org/stories/health-addressing-the-health-workforce-crisis-in-africa-and-in-europe/.

 

A new EU project ‘BeWell’ (https://bewell-project.eu/) kicked-off in December 2022, aiming to promote the upskilling and deskilling of the European health workforce with a focus on a green and digital skills strategy for the ehalth ecosystem that can be implemented the the ‘Pact for Skills’; https://bewell-project.eu/project/

 

Task force for the professionalization of the public health workforce. A new ASPHER and WHO Euro Task Force kicked off in June 2022 to join forces for improving the professionalization of the public health workforce. The Task Force is related to the WHO-ASPHER Roadmap and led by Katazyna Czabanowska, past ASPHER President; a comprehensive literature review will be available in 2023.

 

Applied epidemiology workforce targets and development of an assessment tool, WHO Geneva (Marion Muehlen) organised a kick-off of an international Technical Advisory Group on 19 September 2022. A final report will be available in early 2023.

 

COTEC, the Council of Occupational Therapists for European Countries (https://www.coteceurope.eu/) provides comprehensive statistics and summary of the profession. Latest available data 2022; https://www.coteceurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Summary-of-the-Profession-2022.pdf

 

Information on the European Union of Medical Specialists is available at https://www.uems.eu/. One of the goals of the UEMS is to harmonise the different European Training requirements by describing an European training requirement (including public health) and to help implement these requirements in the different European countries (UEMS-2019.24-European-Training-Requirements-for-Public-Health.pdf); accreditation for CME is also an important issue. For information on activities of the section on Public Health Medicine (UEMS) https://www.uems.eu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/53398/description-section-PH-for-website-UEMS.pdf please contact the section President Marc Soethout, Amsterdam University Medical Center, email mbm.soethout@amsterdamumc.nl

 

EUPH-HWR Board members participate in various EU projects and also serve on advisory boards and health workforce expert panels, among others, of the WHO Europe, WHO Headquarters, professional associations and national and international NGOs.

 

Publications and video/audio records

Commentary by EUPHA-HWR and partners; Kuhlmann, Brinzac, Czabanowska, Falkenbach, Ungureanu, Valiotis, Zapata, Martin Moreno. Violence against healthcare workers is a political problem and a public health issue: a call to action, European Journal of Public Health, 2022; ahead of print, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckac180.

 

The WHO-Euro launched a new Regional Report ‘Health and care workforce in Europe: time to act’ on 14 September 2022 during the 72nd WHO Regional Committee for Europe meeting. ‘This report focuses on identifying effective policy and planning responses to these HCWF challenges across the Region. The report presents an overview of the HCWF situation in the Region (focusing on medical doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, pharmacists and physiotherapists, for whom data are available) and identifies relevant policy options, their expected benefits and potential facilitators or barriers to successful implementation’, available at: https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/362379

 

Policy Dialogue on ‘Building a European Health Union: Opening borders for intensive care specialists‘, organised by the European Policy Centre, September 2022; Matthias Wismar and Ellen Kuhlmann were among the panelists; available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTKxZhNeqHY

 

Women in Global Health. The #HealthToo policy report. Her Story: Ending Sexual Violence and Harassment of Women Health Workers. Executive summary, December 2022, available at: https://womeningh.org/healthtoo/; the full report is coming soon, please check the website.

 

The ‚Great Resignation‘ of Health and Care Workers, organised by Women in Global Health, World Health Summit, October 2022. The recorded session is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUHICxQgFus

 

Africa-Europe Foundation. Policy brief ‘Scope for a future of health workforce initiative’, October 2022, https://back.africaeuropefoundation.org/uploads/AEF_MSH_future_health_workforces_ad89c58ad1.pdf

 

Groenewegen P, ... Batenburg R, Van Tuyl L. Task shifting from general practitioners to practice assistants and nurses in primary care: a cross-sectional survey in 34 countries. Primary Health Care Research & Development, 2022;23:E60; doi:10.1017/S1463423622000470

Schnack H, Uthoff SAK, Ansmann L. The perceived impact of physician shortages on human resource strategies in German hospitals – a resource dependency perspective. Journal of Health Organisation and Management, 2022;36:196–211; https://www.emerald.com/insight/1477-7266.htm

 

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The next EUPHA-HWR Newsletter scheduled for 31 March 2023. Please send notices on conferences, etc., and publications related to health workforce issue until 22 March 2023. Please forward this Newsletter to colleagues and friends who are interested in health workforce research; sign up for the EUPHA-HWR section; https://eupha.org/health-workforce-research.

Ellen Kuhlmann

EUPHA-HWR President

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